Rev5
by minmb82
Summary: rav5


**Chapter 5**

_Kaira, 1 Shiaa , 4408, Faey Orthodox Calendar_

_ Wednesday, 6 July 2022 Terran Standard Calendar_

_ Kaira, 1 Shiaa, year 1333 of the 97__th__ Generation, Karinne Historical Reference Calendar_

_Foxwood East, Karsa, Karis _

_You're going to be late for school!_ Jason's sending snapped through the house, encompassing the entire house because he wasn't entirely sure where his dawdling son and adopted daughter were at. He glanced up at the ceiling, then continued the serious task of getting Bethany's shirt properly buttoned up. His daughter was just the cutest thing ever, giving him a darling smile as she patiently let him fuss with her school uniform, which was a white button-down shirt and a pleated skirt. It was a very Terran outfit, and one of which Jason entirely approved. It was his turn to drop the girls off at school, and thankfully they'd finally gotten settled into the routine of it. They both loved school, not because of what they were learning, but because they'd made a ton of friends in the two months since they began. Siyae came out of the bathroom with her shirt already buttoned up, fussing with her hair, which was much more Faey. Her bangs nearly reached her chin, but the back of her head was nearly shaved, with her hair getting shorter and shorter from front to back. She was putting in the barettes that held her bangs away from her face, and since she hadn't been doing it on her own for long, she was still more than a a little clumsy. Bethany's hair was shoulder length in a very Terran hairstyle.

It was sometimes amazing how quickly his children grew up. It seemed only yesterday that Bethany and Siyae were toddlers, but now they were a precocious 7 year olds, and it was Jon and Julia that were the energetic toddlers that often ran the adults in the house ragged. Rann was surprisingly tall at 14—13, whatever, damn the Faey and their adding a year to someone's age—and at 13, Jason could tell from the way she'd been acting lately that Shya was going to be one of those girls that started puberty early…and when she did, oh boy. Things were going to get weird in the house when a little girl he saw as his daughter was starting to look _sexually_ at the boy that was Jason's son. The fact that they were married wouldn't really hit home until the first time Jason caught them in a compromising position, and he wasn't sure how he was going to handle that, but he knew that time was coming, and it was coming soon. But they didn't come close to his oldest, Aria, who was just starting prep school this year. Aria was shockingly tall at 19, just a few tikra shorter than her parents, and Jason often joked that Songa had overdid it with the growth acceleration program she'd put his daughter on when she first came to Karis. Aria's love of sports and activity had not changed over the years since she'd lived with him, and it seemed like just yesterday she was the gangly, awkward girl he'd brought home. Now she had the body of an athlete, sleek and toned and defined and powerful, and three years of constant activity and hard work had made her strong, agile, and graceful. She'd been at her new school for only two months, and she'd already won a spot on the bachi team playing midfielder, which was almost unheard of for a freshman. Aria played about six diffferent sports, and she was fantastic at all of them.

Aria had definitely filled out in the _other_ way, turning into a gorgeous young lady that drove Jason crazy because she was raised as a Faey and Jason had Terran morals when it came to his daughter. Aria was very popular with the boys because of her exotic skin and her accomplishments both in a classroom and on a bachi pitch, and Jason had had to basically just grit his teeth and bear it when she went out on dates that he _knew_ were going to end up with her conquering her newest boytoy. She knew he had major issues with what she was doing, but in this case, she was having too much fun to stop. She never talked about her sex life to him, and she did honor his views by at least _pretending_ to not do what she was doing where he could see it.

Jyslin, on the other hand, encouraged her every chance she got, and was always the first one to hear all the juicy details of her latest hot date.

Aria made her appearance in the room, wearing nothing at all and with a towel thrown over her shoulder—she didn't have school today—which showed off her impressive assets. Jason was too conditioned to Faey ways to bat an eye over his daughter running around the house naked, which was her preferred condition…a full reversal from the shy, modest little girl that had come to live with him years ago. Aria was both stacked and supermodel-hot, and she liked to show off the body that her constant exercise had sculpted into something any artist would love to capture on a canvas. Dahnai was Aria's role model when it came to her appearance, wanting the same muscular definition and how it enhanced her feminine curves. And the washboard stomach and defined arms and legs showed how close she was to achieving her goal of being as ripped as Dahnai. "Mom told me to remind you that you have to turn in that panel when you drop off the girls," she said.

"It's already in the car," he answered.

"You're not in your school clothes, Ari," Bethany accused.

"No school for me today, squirt, it's a teacher work day. So I'm hitting the beach," she smiled down at her. "Don't forget about tonight, either, Dad."

"I'm not going to forget," he retorted as he patted Bethany's shoulders. Aria was 18, and on Karis, that meant she was eligible for her Class 3 license…_mostly_. She was technically eligible for it at 18, but it required a special exemption…and what do you know, Jason had the authority to grant the exemption. Since he was the one teaching her, he would make damn sure she knew what she was doing before he granted the exemption and allowed her to get her license. Jason had been training her for it over the last couple of months, and tonight he was taking her out for her first vector-based lesson, taking her to Kosigi and back in the skimmer. No child of Jason Karinne was _not_ going to have a Class 3 as soon as possible…and it was going to make her even more popular at school, since she'd be able to fly her friends about anywhere on the planet they wanted to go. She'd be one of the rare few that would have a Class 3 at 19 instead of 22.

She didn't know it yet, but she'd have her own skimmer when she got her license. Jason had bought a used Thrynne 21-B, a compact but well-built four seat skimmer capable of operating in space, and he'd been fixing it up over at 3D in his spare time, where she couldn't see it. It was about the size of a Terran SUV, with seats for four but not much additional cargo capacity, but it would be capable of operating in space, even able to traverse a Stargate. Thrynne incorporated a Stargate passage mode into any ship they built that was capable of space operation. He wanted to surprise her with it, so he hadn't even told Jyslin about it. Thrynne built some quality ships, and the one he bought only needed some cosmetic work done to the hull and a few upgrades to Karinne technology under the hood to make it good enough for his daughter.

She'd have her own skimmer, but it would be a _used_ skimmer. He wasn't about to let _that_ got to her head. If she wanted a new skimmer, or a bigger one, she could save her money and buy her own.

He was of a mind to install an electrical shock system in the back seat that would go off if someone laid down on it.

After getting the girls sorted out, he came down into the kitchen to see Rann and Shya at the table, eating breakfast. The Shio walking back to the counter was one of the biggest changes in the house over the last year. Merra had moved in about four months ago, just after her and Seido's honeymoon, and she'd quickly settled in and found her place in the controlled chaos that was Jason's household. Merra didn't work in the household, but she did cook for them when Ayama, Surin, and Seido were busy. They lived in an apartment Jason had renovated out of the second floor, part of a major renovation that added another story to the house, added two new bedrooms for kids, and most importantly, converted the second floor into a pair of apartments for Ayama, Surin, Seido, Merra, and their current and future families. The second floor was divided into two very large, spacious apartments, each one with three bedrooms, giving them plenty of space for their children, both current and future.

His house was now four stories, and it was starting to look a little…odd. Colonials weren't designed to have so many floors, and it was stretching the design aesthetic of the house to be so tall. Jason and Jyslin had talked about it, and they'd decided that if they had to expand the house again, they were going to effectively demolish it and have it rebuilt in another style. The main problem was, they had no way to expand the house except to go up or down with it. The entire strip was claimed, and between Tim and Symone's house, Myleena's house, and the guard barracks behind the house, on the other side of the _oye_ tree, there really wasn't much of anywhere to go except to add more stories or excavate more sublevels..

Merra and Seido had opened their own small restaurant last year about six blocks from the strip, and it was wildly popular. Seido did still work in the house, but she now worked part time so she could devote proper time and attention to the restaurant. Merra was the one that worked at the restaurant full time, and they'd found three young and talented Shio chefs that could cook just about anything and make it delicious to staff their kitchen. The restaurant they started was small and intimate, meant to be more of a corner café more than a traditional large restaurant, but given it was a Shio establishment, it meant that the food they served was as good as what could be found at any luxury restaurant in Karis. The café only had eight tables in it, which meant that the chefs that worked there weren't overworked, but were quite busy when they were there because all eight of those tables were usually occupied from the moment they opened to the moment they closed. For both Seido and Merra, it was a dream come true to have that café.. It was the dream of any Shio chef to have their own restaurant, and it was one of the reasons both Seido and Merra had come to Karis, because opening their own restaurant at their young ages was extremely difficult back in the Federation. They owned their own restaurant, it was popular, and it was large enough to keep them busy but not so large that it frazzled them. It made both of them truly happy, and now that they were married, it made their lives complete.

Just about everyone on the strip adored Merra, and it hadn't taken her long at all to feel welcome here. What shocked her most was how accepting everyone on the strip was to the fact that she was married to another woman—well, everyone but Temika, but Temika never let her disapproval show. Merra had made quite a few fast friends among the strip girls, and since she loved children, she didn't mind at all being surrounded by Jason's boisterous, naughty brood.

And _naughty_ was no exaggeration. Faey kids were sneaky and devious, and Jason had found that the older his kids got, the more their cunning natures were starting to dominate their personalities. Rann and Shya had a nearly perverse joy in getting in trouble, and they dragged all their brothers and sisters into their shenanigans. They were never openly rebellious, but they did push the boundaries of the rules under whch they lived.

"Morning, Merra," Jason said as he came up to the table. Rann laughed when he lightly slapped the back of his son's head. "And you are about to get on my bad side, boy," he threatened.

"What, we were dressed and ready, Dad," he protested.

"Then why is your hair still wet?"

"Because Shy hogged the dryer," he replied.

"I did _not_," she retorted as Bethany and Siyae ambled into the kitchen. Jason scooped them up one by one and put them in chairs, then picked up Amber and put her on the table, in front of her bowl…which was not filled. She gave Merra an imperious look as the Shio brought another platter over to the table, then gave a squeaky little growl of command. Merra gave her a light look and scraped some scrambled eggs mixed with chopped _diru_ pods, cheese, and Terran bacon into the bowl, one of Amber's favorite breakfasts, and that assuaged the tiny vulpar's impending wrath.

"You working today?" he asked Merra.

"I'll go in after lunch. Fomyk is opening today," she replied. "We're going to the clinic on Faroll after breakfast. They want even _more_ paperwork," she sighed.

"I'm still trying to talk Seido out of that," Jason said, pointing at Rann. "_That_ should tell you why you should never have kids."

"Hey!" Rann protested as Shya giggled, elbowing her husband.

What Merra and Seido were doing was trying to have a baby, but _how_ they were doing it would cause a row on Karis if it got out. The Alliance medical system had a procedure that allowed two women to have a baby that was genetically theirs, where they took the egg of one woman and used it to fertilize the egg of the other. Seido and Merra were in the last stages of going through the process, and if they held to schedule, one of them would be pregnant with their daughter in about two months. They hadn't decided yet who was going to carry the baby. Faey religion was heavily against any sort of unnatural conception, to the point where they didn't even have fertility treatments for women who had trouble conceiving, and it was those religious views that were forcing Seido and Merra to go outside the house to get what they wanted. Despite the Karinne Medical Service treating every species in the house, Songa would _not_ approve the ova fusion procedure used by the Alliance, and Songa's word was law when it came to the Karinne Medical Service. Jason was a little disappointed in his friend that she was letting her religious views interfere with the lives of her patients, but she would not be moved. And since the Medical Service was sovereign, there was nothing that Jason could do about it except pull a few strings with Ethikk to get Seido and Merra in with the best fertility doctor in the Alliance.

"I doubt our daughter will turn out half as badly as Rann did," Merra winked at his son.

"And I thought you were nice, Merra," Rann accused.

"Usually. When I feel like it," she said lightly, which made Jason laugh.

Seido hurried down, wearing what Jason would call nice clothes, a Shio tunic and leggings. "Thanks, love, go get dressed and I'll handle the rest," she said, speaking Shio.

"Any time, dear," she replied, then she hurried upstairs as Seido took over at the grill. Jason probably had the only one on the strip with a wood-burning indoor combination grill/oven installed in his kitchen. It utilized ventilation and airskin technology to keep the smoke contained and easy to vent outside. They'd installed it last year to placate Seido, who _hated_ cooking on the stove and was getting tired of cooking all her meals out on the deck. To a Shio, cooking on anything but a wood-fueled fire was something akin to blasphemy. About the only exception they ever made to that was to use charcoal instead of wood for certain recipes, but the charcoal had to be specially prepared to make it acceptable. The deck outside had a rack just beside the kitchen door holding a variety of different wood types Seido used for cooking, both natural logs and prepared "wood bricks," which was sawdust and small pieces of the specified wood pressed into a block with certain aromatic compounds and spices to add flavor to the food cooked on the fire that wood produced. A service came every day and replenished the rack, that way Seido had the type of wood or wood brick she wanted for whatever dish she was cooking and they didn't have to keep large quantities of wood stored up.

The Shio on Karis were the sole reason why the timber farm business was booming. Several companies on Karis grew specific trees that were used in Shio restaurants, each with a type of wood that Shio swore up and down enhanced the flavor of the food cooked over it. It was part of a Shio recipe book what wood was used in the grill when it came time to cook it.

After herding the kids through breakfast, Jason got them in a skimmer and got his day started by getting them to school. It was two stops to drop them off at their respective schools, including a brief layover when he ran in the panel holding forms that the elementary school wanted for the girls, then headed to work…or what passed for work anymore. It had been almost dull for the last year or so, but Jason was more than happy to be bored at work because that meant that nothing major was going on. The House was moving along smoothly, the planetary terraforming operation was progressing without any hitches, no major wars out there to worry about, the Confederation was holding together, exo-galactic exploration was moving right along with few problems, it was almost as if they didn't need him around. And that told him that he was doing his job.

In all, the last three years could be summed up in one word: uneventful. Since the end of the Syndicate war, life in the Milky Way had been quite placid, despite empires like the Prakarikai out there trying to cause trouble. There had been a few rough edges, like the Belvarian Incursion, but all in all, things had been quite predictably boring…just the way he liked it. The biggest change, he supposed, was that the Confederation was up to exactly 100 members now, with said Belvarians and eight other empires joining over the years, empires contacted by the Confederation as they explored the Milky Way, and with one former member returning to the fold. Two months ago, the Crai rejoined the Confederation, and Jason felt they wouldn't be the only one. They'd seen how member empires had advanced and prospered over the last three years, and it convinced Voss that it truly was in her empire's best interest to be in the Confederation. Jason was quite happy about that, because he rather liked Voss.

Jason felt it was the Ruu that spurred that. Three months ago, they successfully tested their own version of a translight drive, jumping a ship from Ruu Prime to Sevalax in the Magnum Dwarf Supercluster in nine hours. Their version wasn't nearly as fast or efficient as the Karinne version—they didn't have the same power generation tech as the Karinnes, so they couldn't power the engines to reach the speeds of a Karinne drive—but the fact that they built a working drive was what mattered most. It worked, it was stable, and it was safe, and the Ruu were about to built a second prototype engine and expand their testing. And Jason was happy to see it. He had no problems with the Ruu developing their own versions of Karinne technology, because he knew the Ruu wouldn't use it to make war on others. They'd also developed their own version of the GRAF cannon, but that was purely out of scientific curiosity more than a desire for a weapon. The Ruu actually had developed quite a few devastating weapons, but outside of building defensive weapon platforms around their planets, they didn't use them . The Ruu did not have a standing navy, they relied solely on their planetary defenses…and the fact that if anyone attacked the Ruu, the entire Confederation would attack the invaders in return.

Unfortunately, he doubted that the Coalition would ever rejoin. Relations between the Confederation and the Coalition had deteriorated over the last couple of years, because the Confederation was eating into what the Coalition felt was their private playground in the P quadrant. Several systems in the P quadrant had been claimed and colonized by Confederation members, and that had sparked something of a war of words between the two organizations. Holikk and the Subrians were the only reason that things weren't even worse, but those attempts had put the Subrians on the outs in the Coalition. Many saw him as a Confederation lapdog, and they wanted him to step down as leader of the Coalition Congress before his term ended next year. But Jason felt that antagonizing the Subrians was the _last_ thing the Coalition should be doing, because they were the largest, most advanced, and most economically powerful member. The Coalition could very well crash and burn without the Subrians, and most of the Coalition members knew it.

On the home front, things had gone boringly well. The terraforming project had made major progress over the last couple of years, with Sarga now at 63% complete, Kirga 50% complete, Virga 41% complete, and Hirga 38% complete. The Parri that had come to the planet had had three years to establish their villages and grow their trees, so there were now groves and stands of towering _oye_ trees on every continent. Every continent was now populated, and the house stood at an overall population of just over 3 billion citizens. What surprised him most was that there were far more people moving to Hirga than most anyone expected. It seemed that Hirga's rugged topography and colder climate was quite attractive to more than a few Terrans and Faey , on top of the usual races that would find Hirga quite comfortable. Cyman wasn't the CBIM of a deslolate continent, he had four very large cities on his continent to manage, on top of keeping an eye on the terraforming effort and reclamation efforts.

But, unfortunately for him, and the other CBIMs, Cybri was the queen of popularity. Sarga wasn't just the playground of the Shio, it was the most popular place to live among the Faey and Terrans in the house as well, in addition to the usual races that preferred a tropical climate like the Urumi and Skaa. The terraforming process had turned Sarga into an eden, a tropical paradise, and it was so beautiful there that everyone either wanted to live there or took their vacations there. It was starting to rival Menos and Jilaxis as a vacation destination. And as expected, Sarga was dominated by the Shio. The Shio represented 58% of Sarga's permanent population, making them the majority race on the continent. But, while they had the edge in numbers, Jason wasn't allowing them to institute Shio customs and moral values on Sarga. The Shio that joined the house did so fully understanding that they would have to embrace a new culture, one that wasn't nearly as straight-laced as their own, nor one that tolerated discrimination against those who had customs and practices proper Federation society didn't like.

They learned that lesson the hard way. After Jason found out how Shio business owners and managers were subtly discriminating against women like Merra on Sarga, he had Cybri go in there and put her foot down. And like any of her sisters and brothers, Cybri could stomp _hard_ when she was of a mind to do so.

The naval expansion project was completed about a month ago, and the fourth and final fleet flagship had just finished its shakedown period and was ready for active service. Admiral Jeya Karinne had been promoted from her command ship to take command, a decision Jason didn't at all think was hasty given how well she'd commanded her command ship. Much to everyone's surprise, she had kept the name of her ship and transferred it to the fleet flagship, so it was known as the _Pegasus_. Koye had been awarded the other flagship, which she had named the _Saiva_, which had been completed about seven months ago.

They still had the same problem as during the war, however. They had the ships built for the new naval organization, but they didn't have the sailors to man them. Nearly a quarter of the ships built for the expansion were sitting in Kosigi uncommissioned because they didn't have enough people.

The addition of two new flagships and the refit of the _Aegis _had brought them three new members of the CB family, and one of them was a bit of a surprise. The CBMOM of the _Pegasus_, Coran, identified as male, and had selected for himself a Dreamer-appearing hologram and bionoid rather than a Faey one. His reasoning was simple: he found the Dreamer's brown skin more aesthetically pleasing. Outside of that, he was really no different than the other CBMOMs. Jason rather liked the appearance he'd set for himself, which, like Cyman, was burlier and taller than most Faey men, looking much more like a soldier than "regular" Faey men. The other two, Codi on the _Saiva_ and Coja on the _Aegis_, were much more akin to Coma and Cori.

He was nearly halfway through the day's paperwork when someone came into his office without being announced. He looked up to see Krirara looking at him over the desk, several handpanels held against her furry chest in one arm. _Are you responsible for this mess, Jason?_ she demanded, dumping the panels on his desk and picking one up, then thrusting it at him accusingly. _Everything is behind schedule! Bunvar's looking for someone to blame so she can chop them off at the knees._

_ Don't look at _me_,_ he retorted. _Rund had to put a hold on the construction because the facility was in the boundary field of two broadcast power nodes. Bunvar _knew _that, but she started construction anyway, even after Rund told her she couldn't install the power collection system until he fixed the power problem. It's going to pull too much power to be in the phase boundary, it'll burn out the receiver arrays. She can get back on it when he finishes the upgrades to the Setai City node. She'll be on hold for five days tops._

She put her hands on her hips. _Why did I ever agree to work for you?_ she asked tartly.

_Because I paid you five times what you'd get anywhere else, and you're a masochist,_ he replied cheekily. He'd rallied hard to get Krirara to come to Karis after she finished her term in the Kirri Council, and Krirara being a typical Kirri, she played coy with him for _months_, fishing for the best deal possible, showing off that Kirri penchant for negotiation, almost to the point of madness. But he'd been completely justified. She worked for him as a project manager, organizing and executing large-scale projects for the house, and she was the best one he had. She wasn't a member of the house, so she couldn't work on any top secret projects, but he didn't need her for that. Her current project was what he'd told her wanted her to do a while ago, she was overseeing a major project to introduce Kirri symbiotes into the Karis ecosystem, to make the planet appealing to attract Kirri to join the house. The project was more than halfway done, with them building "seeding" installations that cultivated the symbiotes and released them into the atmosphere. Since it was technically a terraforming operation, it fell under the jurisdiction of Grik'zzk, but Krirara had been working with Bunvar more than anyone else, since she was the one building the seeding facilities.

Jason wasn't the only one highly interested in the operation . Songa had been studying Kirri symbiotes for the last few years, and she firmly believed she could get the symbiotes to work for _Faey_ the way they worked for Kirri. She was treading very carefully, however, because a single tiny mistake could turn the symbiotes into a virulent plague that would wipe out all life on Karis.

Krirara was in the unique position of being the only member of the Dukal government that wasn't a member of the House. Krirara held the rank of Executive Manager of the Special Projects Office, which answered directly to Jason. It was an office he more or less just made up to give Krirara clout in the government and the ability to do her job, but that office had turned out to be quite effective. Krirara had staffed it with Kirri that had worked for her when she was Moderator, Makati, Beryans, and Kizzik, and that made it almost insanely efficient and effective.

All in all, Krirara did not mind taking Jason's job offer. Krirara was one of those kinds of people that needed to work, would go nuts if she didn't have something meaningful to do, and the strict laws against ex-government officials being in positions where they might be able to lobby the government would lock her out of the kinds of jobs she would enjoy if she stayed at home. Krirara commuted to Karis every day from her home on Kirri'arr, and under her skillful eye, the seeding project was ahead of schedule and under budget.

_Now, wanna tell me why you're uncharacteristically snippy today?_

She gave him a wry look. _Teenager issues,_ she replied. _My son and I nearly got into a fight this morning before I came to work._

_ Hopefully not over anything important._

_ I suppose that's what made me angry, that he's dug in his heels over something so trivial,_ she replied ruefully. _I think he'll be glad when he's back in school. He's been a pawful since he came home for semester break._

_ And what trivial matter got him riled up?_

_ Seems I work too much to suit him,_ she replied. _Which is a silly thing to think. I work _less_ here than I did when I was Moderator, but the difference is, I'm on a twenty-nine hour day here. So I'm gone at odd hours and constantly wake him up when I leave or come home._

_ Ah, so he wants to spend time with you, but he's never sure when you'll be home. Or awake._

_ Mostly._

_ Simple solution to that is to bring your son and husband here for the rest of semester break and let them have a bit of a vacation while your son's home from boarding school. If he's on the same day cycle as you, you two can spend your off hours together. You can put him up in the house I've set aside for you when you finally join the House._

She gave him a slightly accusing look.

_I'll wear you down yet, woman,_ he grinned at her. _Now take all these panels back to your office and let me get back to slacking off. I have very unimportant things to do, like clearing your husband and son to travel to Karis and stay for a while._

_ This does not in any way affect my decision,_ she challenged. _But thank you, Jason._

That was the most excitement he'd had in days.

But fortunately for him, he had something quite exciting scheduled for after lunch. He was going to continue his training to rate on the Karinne Army's newest mecha, the Cheetah. MRDD had finished its testing of the mecha, and it had been certified for combat operations just two months ago. They only had a few in service, however, because the training program to pilot a Cheetah was significantly different from any other mecha.

He knew that from personal experience. It was _radically_ different from piloting a Titan. The quadrupedal frame required Jason to undergo nearly two months of special training to acclimate to having a body radically different from his own before he could even begin the training program for the mecha. Everything about _everything_ was different when a bipedal, upright man was put into the body of a quadrupedal, horizontally-oriented mecha. He'd had to learn almost everything from scratch, even walking, and it had taken him that long just to get where he was even allowed to merge to a Cheetah.

It was a pain in the ass to rate riggers for the mecha, but the results were more than worth it. Cheetahs were the perfect complement to the other heavy mecha on a battlefield, having the sheer speed and agility that bipedal mecha did not, and their low profile and quickness made them very hard to hit. They were not meant to be a hand to hand mecha, though they had formidable melee weaponry if they had to fight in close quarters. Much like Syndicate walkers, they were most effective at range, where they could use their blazing speed and agility to maximum effect. A Cheetah was nearly as long as a Titan was tall, stood about 24 shakra at the shoulder, which was a good six shakra taller a Juggernaut, but God were those things _fast_. They could hit 620 kathra an hour in a dead sprint—that was 570 kilometers an hour, or about 310 miles an hour—without any kind of grav engine assistance, and could approach the sound barrier when using their grav pods to boost their velocity. They were also exceptionally agile, having grace to back up their insane speed, which made them a nightmare to try to shoot down in a firefight. They had nasty weaponry on top of sheer speed, including retractable monomolecular blades that extended from the sides of the mecha, monomolecular reinforced claws, and IP armor reinforced compressed Neutronium teeth that would let them bite through armor. All of their other weapons, and there were a lot of them, were incorporated into the superstructure of the mecha, so it had no exposed barrels or units, making it look exceptionally sleek and streamlined. The only visible indication that the mecha was armed was the flared unit at the end of the tail, which served as the focusing array of a Tetryon wave weapon that used the tail as its ionic staging tube.

That was by no means the most powerful ranged weapon equipped on the mecha. It was equipped with both pulse weapons and rail weapons, but its most powerful weapon was built specifically for the mecha, a brand new weapon developed by MRDD called a particle cannon. It was a much weaker version of a particle beam projector, firing a narrow beam of subatomic particles in a short burst rather than a sustained stream, but it still had the same devastating penetrating power of a ship-mounted particle beam weapon. There were two of the weapons in the mecha, and they ran down nearly the entire length of the main body with the muzzles in the shoulders to each side of the head, hidden behind gunport doors. The reason they designed the new particle cannon was because, unlike a disruptor or pulse weapon, the beam's trajectory could be changed at the focusing lens, meaning that the barrel didn't have to move to allow the particle cannon to change the vector of its shot. Because of how it was built, the particle cannon was fixed within the mecha, including the "barrel" array, which was where the particles were gathered and charged before firing through the lens, That meant that if the weapon couldn't be aimed by moving the lens, then the entire mecha would have to move to manually align the barrel with the target. That may work for a GRAF cannon, but no way could that work for a mecha, who was moving at high speed and would be shooting at a moving target. The weapons each had a 40 degree field of fire horizontally and a 70 degree field of fire vertically, and had a ten kathra range in an atmosphere before the beam was diffused by the air, which was more than enough in ground combat. For a mecha that didn't have arms and could easily move the weapon it was firing, having a weapon with adjustable targeting was essential. The mecha was armed with two pulse cannons to back up the particle cannons, a rail autocannon that rose up from a door behind the head, carried two of the new Hawk drones and four spinners for additional support (it was simply too fast for ground drones to keep up with it, so aerial drones were designed for it to carry), and had mountpoints where they could mount external weaponry, which made the Cheetah unit very versatile. It could carry about half of the weapon pods designed for Titans, including heavy pulse cannons, and had 16 different pod mount systems designed exclusively for the mecha.

The chassis of the mecha had been redesigned from its original concept to make it much sleeker, leaner, look much more like the cheetah for which it was named. It was lean, long-legged, almost looked delicate, but it was equipped with a carapace, additional armor plating in key locations, and had IP armor systems backing that up, so it was extraordinarily tough. The redesigned legs were exactly what it needed, much more durable and less prone to breakdown, making it dependable and rugged, capable of executing maneuvers that put tremendous stress on the leg units without them breaking down. Jason's suggestion had been implemented in the design of the mecha so that it could rise up on its hind legs like a Parri and manipulate objects with its front paws, which had a digit that could rotate on the paw and become an opposable thumb. The mecha certainly couldn't fight when standing upright, but it was never meant to. It simply gave the mecha some use in non-combat situations.

It wasn't the only new mecha that had hit the Army and Marine units over the last year. The Imperium had designed and built the Valkyrie, which was the Imperium's answer to Titan mecha, and Jason had to admit, they did a _damn_ good job. The mecha was fast, agile, powerful, and surprisingly rugged for a Faey mecha, following Faey design concepts to a tee; the mecha was elegant, beautiful, graceful, fast, and heavily armed. As they'd done with the Knights, Jason had bought Valkyries and had MRDD reverse engineer them so they could build their own version using biogenic technology, and their version wasn't much better than the original Valkyrie. There really wasn't much need to upgrade the original design, they'd done that well with them. All Titan companies now had Valkyrie mecha mixed in with them, for Titans were a little more rugged and had the capability to carry heavy pulse cannons where the Valkyrie did not, but Valkryies were a little faster and a tiny bit more agile due to their sleeker design. Titans still held the title as the mecha able to bring the most boom to a battlefield, but Valkyries were more than viable mecha that were quite impressive.

The Imperium wasn't the only one to build Titan-sized mecha. The Subrians had developed an exceptional large mecha about two years ago, and it had been in service long enough to be updated with a Mark II model. The Verutans and the Jirunji had also managed to build comparable mecha to Titans, with varying degrees of success. Verutan BM-1 (Battle Mecha 1) mecha were good, but they couldn't match Titans or Valkyries in speed or agility, but could match them in firepower. Jirunji Warclaw mecha, on the other hand, gave their giant-sized siblings one hell of a run for their money. The Jirunji were probably the most underestimated empire in the Confederation when it came to scientific knowhow, and their best mecha engineers had really scored a goal when they designed the Warclaw. It was fast, nimble, heavily armed, and significantly more durable than a Valkyrie. MRDD was currently studying the design and working on building a Karinne variant using biogenic technology.

How they got it was simple. They bought it.

Sovial had done what Jason had expected…she had her R&D people design and build the Warclaws with the primary objective of selling them to empires that lacked the engineering ability to design their own heavy mecha. The Jirunji were raking in the profit as well, selling Warclaws to many other empires in the Confederation, and they were rolling in credits with their consulting fees and sales of both mecha and spare parts.

Sioa was interested in Warclaws for the Army, to diversify the inventory to make it harder for potential enemies to counter ground forces by exploiting the weaknesses of a mecha. Cheetahs were primarily Army mecha because they were specifically designed for ground operations, but some Marine Titan companies would be issued Cheetahs to add to their inventories.

The reason was simple. Somewhat surprisingly, in vector-based combat, Cheetahs performed very well when mounted with flight pods. They were specifically built to handle the stresses of high-G maneuvers, and that translated to vector-based combat. And on top of that, their particle cannons were highly effective in space, with no atmosphere to diffuse the beam. They were very fast and nimble in vector-based combat because their combined engine output far exceeded their mass, which made them effective dogfighters when matched up against fighters or mecha.

Jason got a major _Voltron_ vibe out of seeing a Cheetah in space, but there was nothing wrong with that. If 46 foot tall robots could fly and fight in space, so could 43 foot long robotic cats.

So, as of now, the Karinnes had three different heavy mecha in their inventory, the Titans, the Valkryies, and the Cheetahs, and were in the development stage of a fourth, the Warclaw. For the smaller mecha, they had four models in service. The Gladiators, Juggernauts, and Knights had been joined by the Centurions.

The Centurion wasn't an exomech. It was a different class of mecha called an _exoframe_, because the pilot wasn't completely enclosed inside the mecha. It was only 13 shakra tall, which made it smaller than a Gladiator, and the pilot rode in the torso of the exoframe and was completely visible, with just a window of transparent titanium in the front that served as a HUD. The pilot locked in using his pod mounts and controlled the exoframe like any rigger would control an exomech. The difference was, exoframes didn't require special training to use, making them much more versatile and useful to ground troops. Any Karinne Army soldier or Marine could operate an exoframe, and their smaller size made them easier to carry around with an army unit. A Centurion could fold up into a carry configuration about the size of a MC-3 cargo crate, making them easy to ship with ground units in good-sized numbers.

Jason had thought the concept behind the Centurion was silly, until he saw the prototype in action. He changed his mind in a _hurry_. They turned an infantry soldier into a _complete fucking beast_. Not that Crusader armor didn't do that already, but the exoframe significantly increased an infantry soldier's mobility and firepower using the frame's onboard weaponry, plus the ability to carry external weapons. Centurions could carry external weapons and mount weapon and utility pods built for Gladiators, and that made them _absolutely brutal_.

That was one of the most overlooked aspect of the Karinne Army, Jason thought. Sioa designed everything with an eye on maximum versatility and usefulness. Gladiator and Centurion mecha shared the same pod mount system, as did Juggernaut and Knight exomechs. They'd built their versions of the Valkyrie mecha using the same methodology, using Titan parts in them whenever possible to maximize efficiency in part production and repair, and ensuring that they could mount the same pods built for Titans. The only outlier in the system was the Cheetah, and that was because it was designed with an entirely different operational concept, but even it used about 23% of the same parts used in other large mecha and could mount about half of the pods used by Titans on pod mounts on its shoulders, hips, and back. Both general classes of mecha used as many of the same parts as possible to make it very easy to build and repait them. That made it much easier to outfit and equip ground forces, and also made it easier on repair techs when they needed parts for them.

Titan companies weren't called Titan companies anymore because of the Valkyries and Cheetahs that were now integrated into them. Companies comprised purely of Titan-sized mecha were now called macro companies, or _heavy_ companies as the riggers called them.

Despite the House not firing a shot in anger for three years, Jason kept in top fighting trim in case he was needed. He was still rated on every mecha the House used, he'd taken training in most of the operations systems on a ship so he could man nearly any station on a bridge, and he still belonged to the Storm Riders and ran training missions with them. He still worked out religiously to keep in shape, and had even taken training in swords, polearms, and other martial arts like judo and karate so he would be a better fighter when in a rig. Jason could very nearly hold his own against Shakizarr now, and Shakizarr had trained for nearly his entire life in multiple forms of armed and unarmed close quarters combat, because it was a traditional requirement for a Verutan Emperor. By tradition, the Grand Emperor was the most skilled warrior in his army, though it was mostly ceremonial now since the Grand Emperor would never be allowed to fight in a real battle.. Shakizarr was about the best hand to hand fighter in the entire Confederation, and it was Jason's goal to beat him in a spar at least _once_.

Like Cylan, he kept himself prepared in case Karis was ever attacked again. If another war broke out, he would be ready.

He found himself with about two hours to kill before his training session over at Joint Base Sigma, so he decided to indulge in one of his little guilty pleasures…games. He still played Vanguard quite a bit, it was actually good for him because it kept his combat skills sharp, but he'd been spending more time in Cyvanne's game, Citadel Online, than anything else. It had been out for a little over two years now, and the game had absolutely _exploded_. It was, by far, the most popular game in the Confederation, and had just over _three_ _billion_ active players. Clearly, that many people couldn't play in the same world, so the game had 166,388 servers scattered across the Confederation, which each empire's capitol planet holding a cluster of about 200 servers or so. Cyvanne aimed to have about 50,000 people playing on each server, an average of 5,000 per player faction, which she felt was the optimal population to provide more than enough players for other players to encounter but spread them across the game world sufficiently so people weren't stepping on each other's toes. The servers were divided up among Confederation members so players with similar real life cultures were playing together, which alleviated a lot of drama and infighting between players within the game. Karis had 183 servers in its server cluster, with only Karisians able to connect to them, and Jason played on the very first server to come up, appropriately named Primus. He had stuck with a Jagaara magician like he'd used in the beta, and over the last two years, he'd built his character into a well rounded joy to play within the game.

Jason really enjoyed the game. He'd seen the potential of it during the alpha, and Cyvanne had made all the right decisions when they ironed out the final wrinkles. It was just the right mixture of requiring dedicated play time raising skills and getting gear—a practice players called "grinding"—and allowing players to feel like they were getting somewhere. Cyvanne had made the game super-realistic in many ways, and that was Jason's only real complaint about it. Given the game worlds were a continent the size of South America on Terra and a planet the size of Mars (though only an area about the size of Europe was accessible to players), it could take _weeks_ to go from one side of the continent to the other if one did it by walking or using a mount. When a player decided to move to a new area to explore and quest, it was literally a move. They had to pack up their stuff, load it up, then travel for days in real time to get to their destination. There were magical shortcuts to reduce travel time, like transportation spells, ground mounts and flying mounts, wagons, boats, and magical constructs in the game called _scions_ that allowed a player to teleport between two scions. Sure, there were like 4,000 scions scattered across the game worlds, but those scions were hard-wired to connect to just one other scion, and the vast majority of scions in the game were hidden. Very few of them were in plain sight, or in easy to access locations. A player had to explore to find scions, then go through the scion to find out where it went. It created a needlessly complex network of scions that players often had to resort to Civnet resource sites like _CO Today _and _The Armory _outside the game to figure out how to get where one wanted to go using scions.

It was the one thing Jason wanted Cyvanne to change, but she wouldn't do it, no matter how much he threatened her with torment, damnation, and even getting her ass unplugged. At this point, he felt she was refusing to change it _because_ it annoyed him.

Jason had been faithful to his beta server character. He was a magician archetype, and a pretty damn strong one given how little time he had to play, but his real-world combat skills applied to the game to make him more than a match for a monster or other player once they got close to him. He was one of the few magician archetypes in the game that had a sword sheathed over his shoulder, who knew how to use that sword. He still played with Jyslin, several of the girls on the strip and their husbands, and the kids, who had all formed their own guild in the game. Jason didn't lead the guild, Yuri did, and she did a really good job. That was because the kids played way more than their parents, so it was best if one of the strip kids was the one leading the guild.

Yuri all but lived in the game. She was so obsessed with it that Maya had been forced to use the parental controls to restrict her play time.

Sadly, the others had outpaced him in the game. Since he had little time to play the game, he had less time to raise his skills and gear up his character, so he was more or less a lead weight on the others when they played together. The others had skills far higher than his and were equipped with far superior gear. Becaused of that, he more or less did his own thing in the game, and that was good enough for him.

The good thing about the game was that, like Vanguard, he could jump on for only an hour or so when he had time and always had something to do, and always felt like he accomplished something when he logged off to go back to work. Currently he was working on his Scribing skill so he could scribe spell scrolls to sell to other players, which would allow them to add those spells to their spellbooks. To do that, he had to spend time in his research library practicing his calligraphy, because a spell scroll had to be absolutely _perfect_ in order for a player to be able to copy it into his spellbook and learn the spell. In the game, a player could raise his skills by either spending experience points on it, or practicing it. Jason had been dumping all his XP into scribing for over a month on top of practicing it whenever he had time to kill at work, and as a result, his Scribing skill had just cracked 1,000 last takir. It was currently at 1,012.

The only problem was, it had to be 1,250 to be able to scribe the spell he wanted to sell, so he had 238 points to go.

It would be worth it. Last month, Jason got insanely lucky and got his hands on one of the most coveted spells in the game, a spell called Teleport. What it did was allow the caster to travel instantly to a scion that he had previously marked, which drastically cut down on travel times. A magician could mark more than one scion, how many he could mark was dependent on his skill in Translocation magic, but even just being able to mark two or three strategically located scions would allow him to travel all over the continent of Arcavia in hours instead of weeks (the game used weeks rather than takirs, but a week was eight days in the game, not seven). Teleport was so much in demand that a Teleport scroll could go for upwards of 100,000 gold in the most popular player marketplaces, like Alder's Bluff or Serrethal, and Jason saw scribing Teleport spells as his ultimate cash cow. The spell was an exceptionally rare drop from boss monsters in dungeons and raids, so very few players had it. And since it required such a high Scribing skill to create scrolls of it, there were very few people capable of making the scrolls. That scarcity was what made it worth so much in the player markets. Once Jason raised his Scribing skill high enough to make the scroll, he could sell one or two a week at 50,000 gold a pop and rake in insane amounts of gold.

_Finally_. Being a magician was _expensive_ in the game, between the materials he had to buy to use magic and the fact that a player had to have access to a research library to practice Research or Scribing. And if a player wanted a research library of his own, he had to own a house, shop, or some kind of building in which to place it. Houses were _dreadfully_ expensive in this game, so that meant that most players had to rent access time at a research library owned by an NPC or NPC organization…and that was _not_ cheap. The better the library, the more it cost to work there.. Jason didn't have his own house, but what he did have was the guild's headquarters. All of them had pooled their money to buy a building in Serrethar to serve as their guild headquarters, and they'd set up a research library where he could practice his skills.

That was how he contributed to the guild. Since his skills and gear were so much lower than everyone else's, he focused his skills on creating items the others could use. His highest skills were Enchanting, Research, and Scribing, and he made the magical consumables the others used, the enchantments they could apply to their gear to enhance it, and also tried to research and scribe new spells for the spellcasters to use.

But he wanted more out of the game than to just be stuck in the guild headquarters all the time. His plan was to take the money from selling Teleport scrolls and buy his own house in Twinfang, where he could get the best deal. Getting back to Serrethar would be easy, because the city had a scion right in the central square, and he could mark that scion and the scion in Shadeweaver's Forest, not far from Twinfang, to get back and forth. Actually, he would buy land inside the walls of Twinfang and raise his own tower there using magical spells he'd been researching and collecting over the months. Jason decided that if he was going to play a mage, he'd go full-out role-playing with it and make his home a wizard's tower. He already had the spells he needed to build his own tower, he just needed the land on which to build it. And land was the most expensive commodity in the game, particularly in capitol cities like Twinfang. He could get a much better deal on land out in the wilderness on the edges of Jagaara territory, or in a neutral territory city like Serrethar, but that reduced price came with the risk that NPC monsters or thieves of both the NPC and PC varieties would raid his tower and steal everything in it. It was safest to build a house inside an established city or town inside faction territory, and that was the land that cost the most money to buy. Protection and security were not free in this game. In fact, it was damn expensive.

He didn't _have_ to build it in Golden Lion territory. He could raise his tower out in neutral territory without paying for the land, out in the unclaimed wildlands that dominated the center of the continent, but a house built outside the protection of faction territory could be attacked by both NPC monsters and players, which was even more dangerous because players were a hell of a lot smarter than most NPC monsters. Jason could theoretically build a tower out in Jagaara territory and make it almost impossible for NPC monsters to get into it by filling it with magical spells and traps that would repel the invaders, but he doubted anyone could build anything that could keep an exceptionally clever player out of it.

People did do it. They built houses and bases out in neutral territory. But those who did followed one of two methods; they either hid their home so it was nearly impossible to find, or they made it so big and so imposing that it would take an _army_ of players to get into it. Players could hire NPCs to serve as guards and henchmen, and those few people that did build out in neutral territory and didn't hide their homes instead built elaborate, heavily fortified castles filled with magical traps and NPC guards and soldiers to repel invaders.

Needless to say, only the richest players did that. There was this one guy on the Azjar server over on Terra who had built a good-sized private town filled with NPCs that surrounded his castle, which was filled with NPC guards. He ruled the town and surrounding territory, had his own army of 1,000 NPC soldiers, and from what Jason had read, he did a damn good job managing the town and its resources, as well as repelling multiple attempts by other players to either raid his town or take it over for themselves. His little town was flourishing, and it was slowly getting larger and larger as more NPCs moved in. In a few more months, the guy would have a bona fide kingdom, and he'd have an army large enough to expand his claimed territory far beyond its current borders.

And Cyvanne loved it. Players doing stuff like that was exactly what she wanted to see them doing in the game. She wanted players to take the world she had given them and surprise her with how they made it their own. She wanted them to be bold, be clever, and above all, _have fun_. There were players like Jason who spent most of their time in a research library, studying and raising crafting skills. Other players preferred to focus on other tradeskills, like carpentry, blacksmithing, enchanting, tailoring, or leatherworking, but they were like him, they spent more of their game time making things than killing things. There were those who spent all their time buying and selling goods in the merchant cities, what players called _merchant barons_. There were players that spent all their time exploring the most remote areas in the game world. There were players who raided, players who challenged the many dungeons, and players that did neither. There were players that banded together into guilds, and players that played the game by themselves. There were even players who rarely did anything but role-play in faction cities and towns, would spend hours in a tavern pretending to be their character.

Then again, everyone had to do that to some degree. While players knew it was a game, NPCs did _not_, and most NPCs had AIs complex enough to require you to interact with them in order to get information out of them, or buy things from them. So everyone had to role play when interacting with the NPCs, because if you spouted game terms at them, they looked at you like you were crazy…and most NPC merchants didn't want crazy people in their shops. It took a while for Jason to get the hang of role playing with NPCs he interacted with on a daily basis, to the point where he got to know them, came to learn their quirks and idiosyncracies, and they almost started to feel _alive_ after a while. Cyvanne had done an outstanding job with the AI systems in the NPCs, making them as lifelike as possible. Every NPC in Twinfang, some 7,000 of them, had a unique personality. They had jobs, they had homes (or were homeless), they had friends and enemies, they had plans and goals, they had established routines based on their occupation and their personality. After a player stayed in a city or town for a while, he got to know his neighbors, came to learn how the NPCs acted, and could tell when something unusual was going on just by how the NPCs were acting.

Cyvanne had done such an incredible job on this game, it was no surprise it was the most popular game in the Confederation.

He went from one form of play to another after lunch, spending the afternoon doing PIM training in a Cheetah, and it was almost addictive. To run that fast, with the ground flying under his mechanical feet, it was a feeling of freedom he usually only felt when flying his Nova. His afternoon of training was split between time trials, learning how to run fast, and agility trials, navigating obstacle courses and parkour areas, having to do it all without grav pods assisting his jumps. And that was what was the hardest about piloting the mecha, learning how to judge his jumps and land where he wanted. He still had another month or so of training before he could even start the training program for combat operations, but he was in no particular hurry. He had to master moving in the Cheetah before he could start shooting at things.

He felt at home in a Titan, but he had to admit, piloting a Cheetah was _damn fun_. It was almost like it wasn't a war machine, that he was in an exotic giant bionoid just running around the deserts outside Joint Base Sigma.

In four days, he'd be at Joint Base Theta up on Hirga to do mountain training in a Cheetah, and he was both looking forward to that and a little terrified of it. He'd be learning how to navigate extreme vertical terrain…in other words, cliffs, which was the ultimate expression of parkour in a Cheetah. To pass that training phase, he'd have to literally both run his mecha up a cliff and bring it back down, choosing his footholds and jumping from ledge to ledge to get both up and down.

He wasn't alone in his training. As he pulled his mecha into a bay to power down and go through post-op, another Cheetah pulled into the bay beside him. He rose up out of the mecha from the cockpit, which was just behind the neck and between the front legs, the most protected part of the mecha, and Sirri rose up on the elevator platform from the mecha beside him. Sirri, like Aria, had grown like a weed over the last three years, growing into a ravishingly beautiful, tall, athletic woman that was still utterly obsessed with piloting mecha. She was a rigger to the marrow of her bones, and was the youngest rigger on Karis that had fully rated on a Titan. In fact, the only mecha in both the KAS and IAS inventories she _wasn't_ rated on was a Cheetah. The two of them were doing their Cheetah training together. When the time came for her to do her ceremonial conscription, she'd be serving her five years in a rigger company piloting a Valkyrie in the Imperial Marines rather than spend that time in the palace as a military liaison to her mother. She'd already made that deal with Dahnai.

_Not bad, Sirri,_ Jason complemented her as he took off his helmet. _You're getting better every day._

_ You too, Uncle Jason. These things are so fun to pilot._

_ Amen. Sometimes I forget that this is serious business when I'm out there._

She laughed as she took off her helmet, giving him a dazzling smile. Again, he had to just admire how gorgeous Sirri had become, especially with her hair in an adorable touseled pixie style that made her look mischievous. She was one of the most beautiful young ladies in the entire Imperium, and Dahnai was only a _little_ jealous of her. _You have time for more runs tomorrow? Mom's letting me stay over at the summer palace until next month to finish this segment of the training. And I'll be honest, I need more practice. Mastering this having four legs thing is trickier than I thought it was going to be.._

_ I'm not sure, but I'll see if I can carve out some time in the afternoon,_ he answered. _I have a cabinet meeting tomorrow. I try not to blow those off, my secretaries know where I live. Most of them live just down the block from me._

_ Mind if I catch a ride with you back to the strip? Me and Aria are gonna go clubbing tonight._

It wasn't much of a surprise to Jason, but Dahnai was quite surprised that Sirri's best friend in the whole universe turned out to be _Aria_. Jason couldn't understand why she thought that. They were about the same age, and they were both massively into outdoor activities and sports. Jason found it entirely natural that the two would gravitate towards each other, especially since they had so many opportunities to bond whenever Dahnai and Sirri came to Karis.

_Clubbing? Aria has a lesson this afternoon,_ Jason countered.

_We know, we're gonna go after she's done,_ she elaborated. _If I tried to muscle in on her class 3 training time, she'd rip off my ears._

He had to laugh. _I wouldn't be surprised, she's been driving me nuts for the last three months over teaching her how to pilot a skimmer._

_ When do you think she'll be ready?_

_ Honestly? Probably in two takirs or so. She just has to learn the rules when in vector-based flight and practice a little and she'll be ready. She already has atmospheric operations down. Until then, she'll have to bum rides off you._ Sirri already had her class 3 license. She'd had it since she was 15.

_I don't mind, it's no fun to fly a skimmer by yourself,_ she smiled as she used the grav pods in her armor to lift off the back of her mecha and drift towards the ground._ So, can I ride with you or are you gonna make me fly in my skimmer by myself?_

She clearly wanted to talk to him about something in a secure location, and inside his skimmer was secure. Else she'd just take her own skimmer. _Sure,_ he replied. _But let's get through debriefing first and see how bad we did._

About half an hour later, Jason and Sirri were in his skimmer on the way to the strip, with Sirri's skimmer following them on autopilot. She'd changed out of her armor and was wearing a bikini top and a pair of shorts—she'd found that going topless wasn't nearly as much fun once her breasts fully developed and they waggled and bounced all over the place when she was doing stuff—reclining in the passenger seat as he flew them home. _[So, any particular reason you wanted to ride with me?]_

_ [Yeah. You need to talk to Ari,]_ she replied. _[She's been having dreams. I think she's seeing omens again, Uncle Jason. But she won't tell you about them.]_

_ [Why not?]_

_ [Because she doesn't understand what they mean,]_ she answered. _[They're not _good_ dreams.]_

_ [Well, that explains why she's been using the sleep inducer in her bed again,]_ he communed soberly. _[Did she tell you about them?]_

_ [Yeah, but it's like those other omen dreams she had last year. They're almost nonsensical. She keeps dreaming about a village being burned to the ground by a dragon. You and Mom are in the dream, you try to fight the dragon, but the dream always ends before she learns what happens to you. She said the last thing she sees in the dream before it ends is you and Dahnai jumping from the back of winged animals with swords in your hands, hurling yourself at the dragon's face as if you're going to try to kill it. But she doesn't know what happens, or what it even means. She's not sure if she should tell you or not, because she doesn't know if the outcome is good or bad. Since she doesn't understand what the dream means, she's afraid to say anything, that if she makes the wrong decision, you and Mom will get hurt because of it.]_

_ [No, that doesn't sound very good,]_ Jason replied. _[Have the dreams changed any?]_

_ [No, so I'm going to assume that means that whatever she's seeing is still going to happen.]_

That was something they'd learned about the Dreamers and their ability to see the future over the last three years...it wasn't _fate_. The future was not set in stone, and their visions of it were what would happen _if nothing changed_. Being aware of the prophecies they gave could change those predictions if people actively worked to avoid having it happen, and that could make it tricky to make sense of their prophecies. Not all of them were going to happen, because people took actions that altered the progression of future events. Many of their prophecies were warnings more than predictions, warnings of what might be if action was not taken to prevent it. The messy part was trying to figure out which prophecies would come true if someone took no action, and which would come true if someone _did_. Not even the Dreamers knew which were which…or more to the point, they wouldn't tell anyone, not even Jason. That was because, he suspected, they were trying to guide events in the way their omens showed them would be best for the Dreamers, and now the House of Karinne and the Confederation, whom they saw as liberators and allies. So, because of that, they were often deliberately vague about which predictions were warnings and which were true prophecies, because they didn't want Jason or someone else messing up what they were trying to accomplish.

Aria was the wild card in the Dreamer's design, because she lived with Jason, and her interests were solidly aligned with her home, the House of Karinne. She'd been having omen dreams for the last two years, not long after she stopped using the sleep inducer in the bed, but most of her predictions were about little things, things that mattered to a teenage girl, not to the welfare of the House of Karinne. But last year, she'd had a significant omen dream that predicted that Jyslin and the bachi team would be in danger, and that proved to be true. In her dream, Jyslin was the commander of an old-fashioned sailing ship, and she and her crew all drowned when the ship sank in a storm. That was typical for omen dreams, they were couched in metaphor and were rarely direct in what they were predicting. Aria's warning saved Jyslin, prevented anyone from getting hurt, because they decided to err on the side of caution and give every car, skimmer, ship, and transport Jyslin used with any regularity a detailed, in-depth inspection. That inspection had discovered a microscopic crack in the casing of the gravometric engine in the transport the Paladins used to travel to their away matches that would have blown up the ship if it would have breached while the engines were in operation. Jyslin was Aria's mother in all ways but blood, and she was so emotionally connected to her that it caused her to predict her mother's death.

That had rattled Aria, because she saw Jyslin die in her dreams over and over again, and sent her back to therapy and her sleep inducer for a good two or three takirs, but at least she had the wherewithal to warn Jason about her dream before she went back to using the sleep inducer. The dream didn't end until the crack was found and her prediction was thwarted, and in a way, that told them to keep looking until they found it..

Jason was going to take this deadly seriously until he found out more about what was going on. Aria's predictions had already saved Jyslin's life, and this was clearly an omen dream. Almost all of Aria's omen dreams were couched in a medieval, mythical setting, which Jason had learned was normal for Oracles. Each Oracle had a particular _flavor_ in which the omens they foresaw were interpreted by their brains while they were sleeping, and for Aria, it put those omens in a fantasy medieval setting. Any time her dreams were couched in a setting like Middle Earth in _Lord of the Rings_, it was an omen dream.

_[I'll talk to the Dreamers on Tir Tairngire about it before I talk to Aria, see if they've had any omen dreams about it themselves. Thank you for warning me, pips.]_

_ [Aria told me not to, but I think she's wrong,]_ she replied. _[Whether the outcome is good or bad, the one thing she doesn't understand is that you just knowing that she's had an omen dream about you and Aunt Jyslin is important. It means something is going to happen, something important enough to trigger Aria's precognition.]_

_ [Well reasoned, Sirri,]_ he agreed with an approving nod. _[I see your mother's training is starting to show in you.]_

_ [Thanks, Uncle Jason,]_ she smiled.

He pondered the warning the rest of the way home, but Sirri was right, there just wasn't much to go on. What it sounded like, and it was just a wild guess based on the imagery of the dream, was that the House and the Imperium was going to get into a war with someone, but the outcome of that war was uncertain. And that was the _last_ thing he wanted to hear. Things were calm now, peaceful, and the last thing he wanted or needed was another damn war. But there were steps he could take despite the vagueness of the omen, have some long chats with Yeri and Miaari, with Myri and Kraal, and urge the girls to get as many Navy ships commissioned as possible…just in case. If there was going to be a war, he wanted his military ready for it.

It meant that he'd be rearranging his schedule to get fully combat rated on a Cheetah within two takirs. The Storm Riders had been issued Cheetahs, one of the Marine exomech companies that got them, and he had to complete his certification or he might lose his combat ready status, or what riggers called their _active status_. A rigger had to be rated on _any_ mecha in a company's assigned inventory to retain his active status.

He had time before Aria was ready for her lesson to get some of that done, warning the CBIMs, Myri and the command staff, and Miaari. _[That reminds me, Jason, we need to talk about something,]_ Cyvanne said after he issued his orders. _[But it's not related to this. I've been meaning to show you for a couple of days now.]_

_ [Is it going to make me worry even more?]_

_ [No, but it is rather interesting. Mind if I swing by in my bionoid? I have it on a datastick.]_

_ [Sure, we have about an hour before I take Aria out.]_

She arrived about twenty minutes later, coming into his office. She'd changed her facial features and hair yet again, going for the teenage goth look…seriously, he'd never know it was her if not for the identity chip in her bionoid telling him it was Cyvanne. "What's up?" Jason asked as he turned on his panel and reached out his hand for the datastick she said she was bringing.

She handed it over, and he slotted. "This was taken from a security camera on Terra five days ago," she said as Jason accessed the crystal. A hologram winked on showing a picnic area beside a beach. Three people were sitting at a table, but a man wearing a black leather jacket and a man wearing a tee and jeans were on the wooden walkway to the beach, and they were clearly fighting. The jacket guy had a knife, and the other guy was using a pair of wikli sticks, which were sticks used in a Jirjunji game called wikli. The man with the knife lunged at the stick wielder, but he parried the knife with professional ease and riposted by slamming his other stick into the man's face.

"Okay, it's a fight of some kind. And why did this catch your attention?"

"Watch."

He did so. It was clear in seconds that the man with the sticks was a trained fighter, where the man with the knife was not, because the stick wielder just flat-out kicked the man's ass. He moved with elegant grace, using perfect footwork and wielding his two sticks in perfect harmony with one another. He put several welts on the knife-wielder's body and face using his sticks, then disarmed him with a deft maneuver, pincering his knife with both sticks and wresting it out of his hand. He then laid the man out with several sharp blows to the face and head, then backed carefully away from the people at the table, who had made no moves towards him. "Alright, again. Why did this get your attention?"

"The man wielding the sticks is named Kevin Ball. He's a database manager for MM on Terra. Jacksonville, to be specific. The man's never had a formal lesson in any sort of martial art in his life."

Jason gave her a look. "Bullshit. The way he moved—"

"I looked him up. Why this caught my attention, Jason, is that Kevin Ball plays CO."

He got the connection she was trying to make instantly. "He learned how to do that from the _game_?"

She nodded. "It only stands to reason that if you can use your real life skills in the game, that you can use the skills you pick up in the game in real life, at least those that are compatible with real world physics," she told him. "When I programmed the game, I didn't isolate learning physical skills to only that segment of the player's memory that's within the vidlink. I couldn't, because if I did, then players wouldn't be able to practice their real life skills inside the game and improve them. But that's not what surprised me about this, Jason. I knew about this when I coded the game, in effect I _had_ to do it that way if people were going to be allowed to us their real skills in the game. After seeing this, I ran a few passive tests on him while he was logged into the game last night. Look."

She put up a graph, what was called a Reaction To Stimulus, or RTS, curve, which was a representation of the time it took for a person to react to stimulus and respond. It was a baseline test any rigger would have taken hundreds of times, because a rigger's RTS score was the singularly most important score he could have. It was a measure of how fast a rigger could recognize and respond to a threat, and he who reacted first usually won. The graph showed this Kevin Ball's improvement over time, from when he first started playing Citadel Online to the present. And at present, his score looked more like a Faey athlete than a Terran…hell, he was crossing over into "desk job Jhri" territory. His reflexes and response time to stimulus was far, far faster than what would be normal for a man with a desk job, even faster than a professional Terran athlete. His reaction speed was _superhuman_. No normal human had an RTS time that fast. Telepaths did, but telepaths were not normal humans. A telepath's brain was wired differently than a normal Terran's, which gave them the RTS time to operate in the accelerated time frame of the mindscape. Things went so fast in telepathic combat that a non-talented brain simply couldn't keep up with it.

Simply put, telepathic brains were _faster_ than non-telepathic brains. They responded to stimulus faster and they were capable of operating at the speed of pure thought, without the physical aspect of their organic brain slowing them down. There was a physical component to that as well, for a telepath's neural synaptic map was far more complex than a non-telepaths, when the brain created new neural pathways after the telepath's talent became active, pathways that were created specifically with telepathic abilities and applications. But other information could move along those pathways as well, and the rich, complex web of neural connections in a telepath's brain made their brains operate faster and more efficiently than a non-telepath's brain, even in the realm of the physical.

It didn't show nearly as much in the real world as it did in the mindscape, because a Faey's brain was limited by the speed of the body and the ability of that Faey to control her body. But in merge applications, where it was nothing but the brain operating a machine body, with that machine body operating at the speed of its control computer, Faey had a much lower RTS score than most non-telepaths. It was why his Faey riggers and pilots were so nasty in combat, because they were operating from a merge, where the limitations of the body were removed and the Faey was allowed to operate at the speed of the mindscape. Kyva Karinne's RTS times were just as fast as any Shurai's…in fact, she was _faster_ than some Shurai. And Shurai had the lowest RTS times among any race in the Confederation, on the average. And she achieved those stunning RTS times because she was jacked into her mecha rather than operating it manually.

"He must have talent."

"He doesn't. I checked."

He gave her a surprised look. Most Terrans had an average reaction speed of about 160 milliseconds, but people who trained their reaction speed could bring that down to as low as 70 milliseconds, like martial artists, hardcore gamers, and professional athletes. That was the time it took for the brain to recognize a stimulus and then respond to it. Kevin Ball's average RTS time was 17.6 milliseconds. That was a reaction speed more in line with a Faey soldier or athlete or a Jhri desk jockey than a Terran. If this guy had an RTS speed that low, it was no wonder he whipped that knife-wielder's ass. To him, it would be like the guy with the knife was moving in slow motion.

"That's…wow. No human should have an RTS that low."

"Well, he's not the only one," she replied. "After I saw this, I started running some tests on random Terrans who play CO, and I've noticed a substantial increase in RTS time over Terran baseline scores. At first I thought it was something in the game code doing it, but after I dug a little bit, I found out it's the simsense. It's the third generation simsense, Jayce. Third gen rigs are training Terran brains in ways that decrease their RTS times beyond racial norms. But it's not happening to everyone. It seems that Terrans who have the most sensitivity to simsense, you know, the ones that have to set their limiters at the highest setting, they're the ones that are being affected by the third gen rigs the most. The rigs are increasing their reflexes and hand eye coordination, almost as if the third gen simsense is training Terran brains in ways that cause them to lower their RTS time."

He looked at her, then looked at the graph again. "I…guess that would be possible," he said hesitantly. "But I haven't seen any evidence of simsense lowering RTS times."

"Moleculartronic no, but we've known for a while that biogenic simsense can decrease RTS time. That's why the KMS instituted simsense training into the training regimen, to help soldiers develop their reflexes in realistic simulations."

"Oh. And this is only happening to certain people?"

"Yes, those most compatible with simsense, at least for third gen moleculatrtonic rigs," she nodded.

"Have you done any sims to see if it's dangerous or harmful?"

"I've done some preliminary tests, but nothing conclusive yet. Jason, this isn't necessarily a bad thing."

"I know. There's nothing _bad_ about allowing people to achieve their full potential, even if it's something like an unexpected side effect of a simsense rig. It sure helped this Kevin Ball guy when he was accosted by that man with the knife. Dig a little more, Cyvanne. Find out who's been affected the most, how much they've been affected, and try to track down exactly why some people are more susceptible than others." He looked at her. "Does it show any effect in the game?"

"With this guy, yes. Kevin Ball is one of my most unique players, Jason. I have a personal interest in him."

"Why is that?"

"He plays the game completely solo, and he's the only player in all of CO that plays solo at the level that he does. That makes him unique," she answered. "He just recently revealed that he plays the way he does as part of a challenge to himself to see how far a player can get in CO completely solo, and this guy has accomplished more than I thought any solo player ever would. He can kill overworld boss monsters solo. He's even cleared twelve _dungeons_ completely solo. And despite him playing solo, he's one of the most powerful characters on his server. He's so strong that he qualified as the Champion on his server, beating out the _raiders_. His gear lags well behind the other Champions because he doesn't raid or do current content dungeons, but his skills are so high that it more than makes up for it. He has a sword skill of almost _three thousand_," she told him.

"Seriously?" he asked. The Champions were added into the game with the last content patch. There was one of each race on a server, and it was the most powerful player of that race on that server. The Champions had access to exclusive quests and gear, and were currently doing an epic questline called the Grand Crusade, which Cyvanne told him was going to affect the game world in a very direct way when it was completed. The end result of the Grand Crusade was going to cause some major changes in the game world, but she wouldn't tell him what they were going to be. When it came to the game, Jason was a player, not the Grand Duke Karinne, and she never spoiled anything.

He could see why this Kevin Ball could handle the Grand Crusade. He'd never heard of _anyone_ having a skill at or over three thousand, in any skill. Anywhere in the game. If it was that high, good God, this guy had to be an absolute wrecking ball, because of how skills worked in the game. A weapon wasn't the main source of a player's damage, it was the player's skill. The weapon did modify that damage, the better the weapon the greater the modifier, but the base damage was calculated using the player's weapon skill or spellcasting skill and his physical or mental stats, depending on the attack used. But a high skill in a melee weapon or unarmed combat mattered not just for the damage, but also because it gave the player many more opportunities to deal damage in a fight. Just as a master fencer could score points at will against a neophyte, someone with a sword skill that high could all but toy with anyone with a much lower skill. With a skill that high, this guy would be a viable threat to nearly any other player with nothing but a butter knife. And if this guy had a sword with even a moderately decent damage rating to pair with that skill…_holy shit_. He'd be like that character in that South Park episode about _World of Warcraft_, the bad guy running around in nothing but his underwear and using a crappy little dagger that could one-shot anyone in the game. Only a raider would have the gear and skills to hold his own against this guy.

In Citadel Online, skills were _much_ more important than gear.

If his skill was that high in the game, no wonder he could use that skill so well in the real world.

"Look into this, Cyvanne, and look into this Kevin Ball. Try to find out just how much of the skills he learned in the game he can use in real life. If his sword skill inside the game is three thousand, damn, he could take on Zorro in the real world. Just be discreet."

"I already am," she nodded. "I'm keeping an eye on him, but it's not easy. He's a recluse and an introvert."

"I just wonder how the hell he got it so high," Jason mused. "I've seen the hardcore players, the ones who play the game for a living by streaming their gameplay, and most of them don't have skills much over two thousand."

"Lone Wolf," she replied. "He has Lone Wolf. And he's had it for nearly eighteen months."

"Holy shit, seriously?" Jason asked, giving her a surprised look. "If he has that, no wonder he plays completely solo. Lone Wolf doesn't work if he's in a group." Lone Wolf was an Ancient Skill that one acquired as loot from beating a boss monster, and it was almost mythical in the game. It was, by far, the _hardest_ skill to acquire in the game, even more difficult to get than a Legendary skill, because of what you had to do to make the skill drop. It only dropped from overworld boss monsters, and the only way you could get it was to kill that overworld boss monster _by yourself_. And boss monsters were designed to require a large, well-balanced group to take down. You had to kill the boss completely solo, no other player could help in any way. If they did, it removed Lone Wolf from the possible loot the boss would drop. And even if you did kill the boss solo, the drop rate for Lone Wolf was estimated by most resource sites at .05%. So it was an ultra-rare Ancient Skill that would only drop if a player pulled off one of the hardest things to do in the game, kill an overworld boss monster solo.

If this guy had Lone Wolf…_wow_. Just…wow. He was the only player Jason had ever heard of that had it.

Lone Wolf, as its name implied, only worked when someone was solo, and what it did was increase the chance the player had of his skills increasing when he was using them…the higher the Lone Wolf skill, the higher the bonus to getting a skill-up while using a skill while solo. If you were grouped, Lone Wolf went inactive until you were solo again. It was, by far, the most overpowered skill in the game, for a simple reason; at the very high end of the skill curve, the bonus from Lone Wolf to getting skill-ups really, really mattered. Once you got a skill over 1,000, the chance of it increasing through use dropped almost exponentially, forcing you to spend experience points on it to raise it at a steady pace. And if this guy had never grouped with anyone, ever, and he'd had Lone Wolf for a year and a half, then he'd had all that time to increase his skills with the boost from Lone Wolf…no wonder his sword skill was so insanely high. Hell, all his skills must be insanely high. Unlike virtually every other player in the game, he didn't have to spend XP to raise his skills once he got them over 1,000, Lone Wolf was granting him skillups during the course of gameplay, which caused his skills to go up much faster than anyone else.

Since Jason played by himself so much, he really, _really_ wanted to get Lone Wolf. It would let him skill up much faster in the limited time he had to play. That was why he knew so much about it, he'd looked into how to get the skill after hearing about it from another player.

"Well, that explains it," he mused, looking at her. "I didn't think anyone had Lone Wolf."

"It's not _that_ rare," she said defensively. "Nearly thirty thousand players have it."

"Out of what, a _billion_? You're a computer Cyvanne, why don't you tell me what the percentage is of players that have that skill?" he asked caustically.

"If this is you trying to guilt trip me into making me increase the drop rate, keep trying, Jayce," she replied smugly.

"Now I'm going to get it just to spite you," he retorted, which made her laugh. "If this guy can kill overworld boss monsters solo, so can I. I'll just keep trying until I get it."

"Oh really," she drawled, giving him a wicked little smile.

"Yes, really. And I'll do some of your work by getting some advice from the source, which should tell us more about this guy," he replied. "So you're going to bend the rules a little bit and do me a favor."

"And what is that?"

"Copy Blackfang onto the server this guy plays on so I can talk to him in game, that way he doesn't know who I am."

"I've already tried that with in-game characters. He's a paranoid introvert, Jayce, he doesn't talk to anyone except like three people, he sees all other players as potential enemies. But, we can use one of them to get in with him. He's friends in game with Captain Mikano Strongblade's sister."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah, her name is Sano, and she works for the Federation News Network on Terra, so she plays on a Terran server. If we approach Mikano about it, maybe she can get Sano to introduce us to him inside the game. That'll be about the only way we're going to get anywhere with him. I've looked up his records in the Terran database, and he's got some serious issues. He's a farm survivor, Jayce, and he served on a farm longer than any other Terran that's still alive. Three years and six months," she said grimly. "He's got several PTSD symptoms, the biggest of which is a phobia of Faey. Something happened on that farm that psychologically scarred him for life. And that's on top of the physical scars."

She put up a hologram over the desk, showing the ID photo of one Kevin Bartholomew Ball. He was an average looking man, looked to be in his thirties, but what dominated the picture was the deep, angry scar that went across the left side of his face, starting just under his middle of his left eye and running at an angle across his cheek, ending under and behind his left ear, down on his neck. Jason almost shuddered to think what could have caused it, and how much pain it would have caused; for it to be that long and at that angle, whatever cut his face must have hit his cheekbone. Most people had scars like that removed by the Medical Service, but he had not.

It wasn't the only scar. Jason nearly gasped when she put up Medical Service archive photos of him, and his body was _covered_ in scars. They were all over him, from the tops of his feet to his hairline, and the worst of them were on his torso, both his front and his back. He had an absolutely savage scar on his back that went all the way across at the middle of his shoulder blades, that looked to have been so deep that it must have cut through both his scapulas and his spine…an injury he probably only survived because of the skill of the Medical Service. His body was a brutal testament to the abject cruelty that he and the other farm workers had faced when the Trillanes were in control of Terra, and seeing him made him furious at the Trillanes all over again.

"Why is he suffering from PTSD symptoms? He should have free access to psychiatric care!"

"He won't go to them, because the doctors they send him to are _Faey_," she replied. "Faey have all but supplanted Terrans in just about every medical field on Terra, Jayce. When the Medical Service took over, they more or less yanked the license of every Terran doctor. Since he has to go to a Faey to get help, he won't go. He hasn't even shown up for his annual check-up for six years."

"They weren't supposed to do that. They were supposed to absorb the Terran medical workers into the Medical Service."

"They did on paper, but when it came time for the Terran doctors to get their Medical Service credentials, the vast majority of them were rejected. The Medical Service made them go to Faey medical school to get them back, and most Terrans wouldn't do it. You know Faey, Jayce. They don't like other races encroaching into territory they believe to be theirs. Even after nearly twelve years since the order to absorb Terran doctors, Faey still dominate the Medical Service on Terra. Very few Terrans go into the medical profession anymore."

An old memory of Doc Northwood flitted through his mind, how he was sent to a farm because of a disagreement with a Faey doctor. But that was supplanted by a more sober thought…what Kevin Ball must have went through. Nearly four years on a farm, the longest-serving surviving farm worker from the subjugation. No wonder he had psychological issues, even after fourteen years.

It struck him. If he looked that young now, he must have just been a _kid_ when they threw him onto that farm.

Dear God.

"Alright, the most obvious question. If the Medical Service knows he has problems with Faey, why do they keep trying to assign him Faey doctors?"

"That's a good question, and one I can't answer," she replied. "The files I have access to do make note of his phobia of Faey, but his medical history is filled with doctors with Faey names. It's like they don't care that he's terrified of his doctor. And that's very much unlike the Medical Service."

"Yes it is," he agreed soberly. "Talk to Songa. She has access to parts of the Medical Service mainframe you don't. Ask her to make a few inquiries."

"I will," she nodded. "And I'll copy Blackfang over to his server. It's Methrian on the Terran server cluster. I won't even have to change your race, because you'll be on the same faction as him. He plays a human in game. I'll add the ability to connect to Terran servers to your main vidlink, so you need to connect through it to get there."

"Alright. But I get to keep anything I get on Methrian," he said quickly. "You mirror that over to my real character."

"Fine," she said, almost against her will, giving him a sulky look.

"You're going to be _so_ depressed when I finally beat you at this little game you play, girl," he threatened, which made her laugh.

"I don't torment you in game because I'm mad at you. I do it because it's fun," she winked. That was the truth. Since Cyvanne had admin access, she could do little things like spawn boss monsters on top of him, or alter the game's topography to create giant pits under his feet, or alter his gear, skills, and stats. She seemed to take perverse pleasure in messing with him, from the childishly obvious to the subtly obscure, and he put up with it mainly because there wasn't much else he could do outside of pull her plug. But, he could admit, she was fair about it. She always fixed everything after she was done pranking him, and she did apologize from time to time in the form of special pieces of loot or neat little toys. She never gave him anything that would affect gameplay or give him an unfair advantage, so her gifts were more whimsical than practical. But he did appreciate them, she'd given him some very nifty little toys and trinkets over the last couple of years that were a whole lot of fun to use.

This…disturbed him. He looked at the pictures of Kevin Ball and felt like he'd failed the man. There were laws, rules, very specific policies about how those farm worker survivors were supposed to be treated, and it sounded like they weren't being followed. He used his access to Terra's computer system and brought up the government file on him, and that made him frown even more. He worked for a Faey company, which was a little odd given he had a phobia of Faey, but he lived a lower middle class lifestyle…and that was _wrong_. The monetary settlement that he received from the Trillanes should have allowed him to retire and live off the interest for the rest of his life, yet he worked something of a dead end job and lived in an efficiency apartment in one of the poorer sections of Jacksonville, Florida. He had no access to his financial situation, because he banked at a Moridon bank and there was no way he was getting information like that form the Moridon, not without all but declaring war on them and physically forcing them at gunpoint to hand it over. The Moridon took the privacy of their customers _deadly_ seriously.

No former farm worker should be living like that. Jason instituted very strict rules when he had control of Terra that ensured that all farm workers would be cared for for the rest of their lives.

"I think I'm going to do some digging of my own," he said in a quiet tone, rippling with undertones of anger. "Kim should be taking care of men like Kevin Ball, and it's clear that he's not. I doubt it's his fault, but there's a failure somewhere in the U.N. system that allowed Ball to slip through the cracks, and I'm _not_ going to let that continue," he declared strongly. "After what those men and women went through, no. They deserve more than to be cast aside and forgotten. Excuse me a second." _Aya._

_ Yes, Jason?_

_ I need to go to Terra tomorrow afternoon. Get everything ready._

_ I'll arrange it. Where are you going?_

_ I'll start in New York, but I'm not sure where I'm going from there, it'll depend on what I find out. So be ready for me to go just about anywhere._

_ Alright._

_ [Chirk.]_

_ [Yes, revered Hive-leader?]_

_ [I'm taking an unscheduled trip to Terra tomorrow to deal with something that just came to my attention. I'll be leaving after the cabinet meeting. Reschedule my appointments for the day after tomorrow and leave my schedule open for a day or two after that. I'm not sure when I'll be back.]_

_ [I will have a new schedule ready for you in the morning.]_

_ [Thank you, Chirk. Sirri.]_

_ [Yeah, Uncle Jason?]_

_ [Afraid I have to cancel the runs tomorrow. Something came up, I have to go to Terra tomorrow afternoon.]_

_ [Aww, okay. But when you get back, we're going.]_

_ [That's a promise.]_ "Send me anything you dig up over the night and I'll look it over in the morning," he told Cyvanne.

"Will do," she nodded. "I'll run some more tests on other players so I can get a broader view of who's being affected by third gen, so we can isolate what qualities it is about those people that allows the simsense to affect them. I'll bring Songa in on it, we'll have something to show you in a couple of days."

"Sounds good," he nodded.

He did some more research for the rest of the afternoon on Kevin Ball, the effect of third gen simsense on people, and the overall policies and practices of the Terran government concerning farm survivors, then he went home and got a head start on his final commitment of the day. He was sitting in the passenger seat of his smallest skimmer, a four seat model not much unlike the Thrynne he'd bought, supervising as Aria started up the skimmer and got it ready for leaving the atmosphere. He'd taught her the procedures for space flight already, and this was her first chance to put that training into practice.

"Alright, what else do you have to do, Aria?" he asked her.

"Umm…I have to call control, since space above Karis is restricted," she replied as she sealed the skimmer's hatches and pressurized the cabin.

"Right. You have your flight plan locked into your nav?"

"Yup. That means I can call control, right?"

"Right. So go ahead."

"Karsa control, this is skimmer KR-31, requesting flight plan approval."

_"Skimmer KR-31, Karsa control. Accessing flight plan." _She didn't have to wait long, as Karsa air traffic control accessed the skimmer's nav computer and checked its flight plan. _"Flight plan approved,"_ came the response. _"No restrictions over Karsa airspace at this time. Traffic along planned vector is moderate to heavy, so expect traffic."_

"Understood. KR-31 out. Like that, Dad?"

"Very good, pips. You ready to take off?"

"I think so."

"There's no _think so_ when it comes to piloting a skimmer, Aria," he warned seriously. "You either know you're ready, or you're _not_ ready. Guessing can get you killed. Don't ever forget that."

She glanced at him. "Then I'd better make sure I'm ready."

"Smart girl."

They were in the air about a minute later, and Jason watched as Aria flew them on a shallow ascent angle out over the ocean, then ultimately out into space. She then switched her grav engine from atmosphere mode to vector mode, where the engine only engaged to make course corrections, allowing the skimmer to drift on its own momentum whenever applicable. The funny thing was, she didn't _have_ to learn how to fly vector-based using a translation engine, it operated exactly the same either in an atmosphere or in space. However, a pilot had to able to fly using vector mode to pass a Class 3, since not _every_ skimmer on Karis had a translation engine in it. There were still differential grav engines on Karis, mostly skimmers and dropships that new citizens brought with them when they moved here. And since they were available on planet, a pilot had to be able to use them to get a Class 3.

"Okay, this is harder than flying around the city," she said, watching a Stick carrying four cargo pods carefully, that was about three kathra in front of them. It was also headed for Kosigi, no doubt carrying parts and materials for the scout ships they were building. Now that the Naval expansion was complete, Kosigi had shifted its production to KES scout ships, both standard research models and Vanguard models. They'd also started construction on a third class of ship that was much smaller, about twice the size of a corvette, that was strictly meant for star charting and initial evaluation missions. The ship would chart the interior of a star system and conduct initial sensor sweeps of its interior to look for anything promising to investigate further. The procedure would be for a mapping ship to go in first and chart the area, conduct long-range sensor scans, then send those data to the research ships to allow them to choose systems to explore. The mapping ships would only have a crew of six, which would allow them to field a ton of them, and would naturally be equipped with some fearsome defensive systems to protect them out there. However, they would _not_ be equipped with translight drives. Mapping ships would be towed in by other ships, carried in a Vanguard, which had sufficient landing bay space to carry 16 mapping ships in addition to their usual complement of Nova fighters, or carried in KES exploration super-ships, the first of which would be ready in about seven months.

"What's the rule out here?" he asked.

"The bigger ship has right of way," she replied. "And since I'm just a little skimmer, I yield to just about everybody."

"Very good," he nodded. "When do you start decelerating?"

"Before I enter Kosigi's gravity well."

"Good. Do you have to call Kosigi control?"

"Of course I do, they have to give me permission to land," she replied, a bit tartly.

"Just making sure you remember," he said lightly.

She made a face at him.

Jason explained things and gave her some pointers as they spent a leisurely hour cruising to Kosigi, then he had her land in one of the corvette landing bays…and _that_ made her nervous. Much like the landing bays on super-ships, those landing bays were below the surface, so she had to descend through the outer door and down a short tunnel of sorts to reach the main bay beneath. She landed them a bit harder than normal—she _was_ new at this—but did just fine otherwise. He then had her take off and return home, but this time they took a much longer circular route around the planet, teaching her orbital dynamics and how to orbit a planet to reach a specific landing point.

It was while they were in a low orbital track, circling the planet to reach their entry vector to get them back home, that Jason decided to broach the subject with her. "Sirri told me that you've been having an omen dream, my little treasure," he said.

"She did? That rat! I told her not to say anything!" she blurted angrily.

"She did the right thing, so don't be mad at her," he told her. "Aria, whether you're seeing something good or something bad, it helps to let us know about it," he told her gently. "That way we can either prepare for it or we can try to change the outcome."

"But that's just it, Dad, I don't _know_ what it means. The dream ends before I see what happens!" she said, looking at him. "I can't tell if it's good or bad or what! That's why I didn't want to tell you, because it would just make you worry about something that may not mean anything. It's not the first time one of my omen dreams has been over nothing."

"They're over what's important to you, Aria," he said, putting his hand on her wrist. "And who won your school science competition _mattered_ to you."

"It almost felt like I was cheating," she said, her cheeks flushing a bit.

"Your dream told you that what you had wasn't good enough to win, so you put in way more effort," he replied with a smile. "And guess what? It paid off."

"I only got third place," she said in a low growl.

"That's better than fourth, and we were proud of you for it, you were up against some serious competition," he told her. "But what matters here, pips, is that you should never feel like you _shouldn't_ tell us about a deam. I'd much rather find about it early than find out about it late, even if it doesn't mean anything."

"But this one _means something_," she told him, the words tumbling out of her, exposing her prior statement as the evasion it was. "The way it feels, the way I feel when I wake up, Dad, it means something important. But I don't know what. I wake up before the dream ends, every time, and I always feel a cold dread inside me. But I don't know_ why_. I don't know if you're supposed to fight, or if fighting is the wrong choice. I don't understand what the dream is saying, but I know that if I tell you the wrong thing, that something bad will happen. So I didn't want to say anything at all."

"You say the dream scares you?"

"Every time," she said, looking at him with earnest eyes. "I wake up wanting to scream, and I'm so upset I have to use the sleep inducer to get back to sleep. But I've been leaving it off at first to have the dream, hoping that I can see how it ends so I can try to understand what it means, so I know what to tell you."

"Alright. That helps," he said, leaning back in his seat and crossing his arms, his brow furrowed in thought. "I think you and me need to take a trip to Tir Tairngire, my little treasure. We should talk to the Elders there, maybe they can give us some advice on how you can see the rest of the dream, so you can try to interpret its meaning."

"I…I wasn't sure if I should. But if you think so, Dad, then we can."

"The world is a heavy burden, Aria, it's easiest to carry when you have help," he told her. "You think I run the House by myself? Think again. I have _tons_ of people helping me, and I couldn't do this job without them. You should never feel ashamed over asking for help, Aria, not when it _matters_."

"Alright. Then can we go to Tir Tairngire tomorrow?"

"I can't go tomorrow, I have something going on over on Terra. But we'll go as soon as I get back, okay? That'll give you a couple more days to try to discover the meaning of the dream by yourself. I want to give you that chance."

She gave him a look of relief and gratitude, understanding that he was telling her that he trusted her enough to try on her own. Unfortunately, one thing she'd learned from Jyslin and the strip girls was Faey pride. "I've been trying my best to see the end of the dream, but I've had no luck so far."

"It's entirely possible that what you've seen _is_ the end of the dream, pips," he said absently. "Maybe events haven't developed enough yet for you to see the outcome. But that's something the elders can help us with when we go see them," he added, looking over at her. "But either way, pippy, it's going to be okay. We'll find out what the dream means, and if it's a warning, then we'll do what we need to do to make sure it doesn't happen."

"Okay. Thanks, Dad," she said, leaning over and patting him on the leg. "That makes me feel better."

"You're welcome. And don't be mean to Sirri."

"I guess I won't. But I'm still gonna get her for breaking her promise to keep it secret."

"Just don't get too exotic. I don't want Dahnai over here looking to beat you up."

"I think I can take Aunt Dahnai," she said with a sly grin.

"I'll let you set off that bear trap on your own. When I'm nowhere near you," he said dryly, which made her laugh.


End file.
